April in Paris is about spring buds, blossoms, lovers and delicate sunshine – everyone knows that. Just because the temperatures are often in the 30s or 40s Fahrenheit, branches still barren, makes no difference at all. So it was with a light heart and step that I trekked to the western edge of town the other day to revisit one of my favorite gardens anywhere: the lavishly landscaped Parc de Bagatelle.

Edging the Bois de Boulogne and posh Neuilly, Bagatelle comes complete with ponds, grottoes, fountains, lichen-frosted statues and sexy sphinxes, a miniature chateau, orangeries, a café and restaurant, and remarkable rose and iris gardens. Peacocks feathered and of a human kind saunter along looping lanes, some draped with wisteria or clematis. The exquisite whole is tied together by more tortuous history than could fit into several of my monthly columns.

Once upon a time, in the days of gluttonous yore - the 1980s - the celebrated Burgundian hill town of Vézelay, crowned by the Basilica of Mary Magdalene, was known as "a site of gastronomic pilgrimage." Rarely did anyone evoke Magdalene's relics or her UNESCO World Heritage Site shrine. Rarely did gastronomes notice the strangely attired pilgrims trudging up the looping, lichen-frosted lanes to venerate the longhaired, wild-woman saint.

In the 1980s, pilgrimage wasn't in fashion. Hedonism seemed the thing. The Michelin-starred hotel-restaurant in crusty Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay at the saint's feet was the shrine. Thousands offered up wallets on the altar of haute cuisine. Only zealots spoke of the moldering bones inside the basilica's gilt reliquary.

Gargoyles glare down from the towers of Notre Dame as a motorcycle speeds up a ramp and tears into the air, arcing like a flying buttress, its spinning wheels dropping inches from terrified tourists and the sculpture-encrusted façade of the world's most famous, most beloved, most reinvented and most mobbed cathedral.

The fantasy flashed through my irreverent mind as I clambered among joyous crowds seated on the temporary wooden bleachers and ramp that will face the cathedral until the end of this year. Worshippers wept and sang as cameras clicked, buzzed and whirred. Bliss and bafflement filled me.

We'd watched the carpenters build the ungainly platform, a here-today-gone-tomorrow structure so at odds with the solid pile of stone 100 feet in front of it. We'd hoped, vainly, that it would recreate the medieval maze of narrow streets that stood here until Emperor Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann wiped the slate in the mid-1800s to make the cathedral's wide, modern square.

Script large enough for a par-blind skeptic like me to read declared that Notre Dame Cathedral was 850 years old this year, 2013. I wrestled the numbers back to 1163 and smiled a Gioconda smile. You had to wonder how many of today's hallowed stones, sculpted or squared, had actually been part of this ecclesiastical flagship as it rose from 1163 to 1345, the date of its putative completion.

The first fat flakes clustered along my sleeve as I stood facing the Luxembourg Garden on the icy Left Bank. A grumpy street sweeper from the south side of the Sahara scattered salt and scowled. Then he looked up and batted his clotted eyelashes. Snow! In Paris? What a forgotten thrill!

Will the loved-to-death, storm-martyred Cinque Terre ever see the light at the end of the tunnel?

Which tunnel? There are many, many tunnels between the wave-lashed coves and perched, pastel-painted villages of the over-subscribed, over-reported, and now brutally hobbled Cinque Terre.

Above all there's a long, dark tunnel not of love but of disdain or disregard in the mind of the global public lying between the little-loved, unsung port city of La Spezia and the tourist mecca of the Cinque Terre 5 miles north.

The latest blow to the Riviera's breathtakingly picturesque suspended villages came last September, with yet another flash flood and killer landslide.

While the world's attention was focused on Sandy, smaller but similarly devastating storms hit the eastern Italian Riviera. Four people were seriously injured. Hillsides and hiking trails slid into the hungry Mediterranean's waves. Since September, the authorities have closed not only the roller-coaster hiking trail #2 linking all five Cinque Terre villages, but also the celebrated Via dell'Amore seaside stroll between Riomaggiore and Manarola.

I was staring, mesmerized, my mouth watering at a giant mozzarella. The elastic curd was submerged in a giant bowl of cold water in my favorite small, family-run specialty food store in Rome. The bowl was shaped like a huge puckered blossom. It sat atop a glinting counter at E. Volpetti & C. on Via Marmorata near the Pyramid of Cestius in the Testaccio neighborhood in southern-central Rome.

The archetypal Aladdin's Cavern of gastronomy, Volpetti is a place of secular pilgrimage for savvy foodies but also for normal, food-loving, unpretentious Romans.

Dozens of hams were displayed in cubby-holes, the archives of porcine paradise waiting to be sliced to order by bona fide prosciutto experts. Jowl bacon and smoked pancetta dangled like headhunters' trophies. Jars of artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes, and slices of eggplant towered over the human scrum at the counter. Baskets brimmed with gnarled white truffles worth their weight in silver, truffles so nose-tickling that I nearly swooned of airborne gluttony.

What Do Paris, Saint James, Scallop Shells, Pilgrims And Primitive Under-Floor Heating Share With Unicorns And Abbots?

Easy: Paris's Cluny Museum, officially France's National Museum of the Middle Ages.

Deciphering the mysteries of this riddle is as easy as clambering up the wooden staircases of the museum and poking through the labyrinth of its cluttered rooms.

Look at the hewn stone and massive brick walls. They might be in the Roman Forum. Correct, the Cluny Museum occupies a medieval-Renaissance mansion built into the ruins of an ancient bathhouse. It's the oldest building in Paris, exuding atmosphere scented by beeswax. Once the Paris home of the fabulously rich Abbots of Cluny, for nearly 1,000 years Rome's right-hand man lived here, possibly in greater comfort than a king.

Spiral or sweeping stone staircases, mullioned windows, Gothic gables and vast salons with massive timbers and mammoth fireplaces, stained-glass windows, secret passageways and sublime keyhole views: this was the abbot's little Paris hideaway. The rest of the time he lived in an even more sumptuous residence in the town of Cluny in Burgundy.
Somewhat reduced by 19^th-century modernizers and other urban vandals, the garden of the Cluny Museum once swept all the way from today's Boulevard Saint Germain to the Seine. Now it's a small, mossy enclave where fountains splash and the kinds of herbs and medicinal plants the monks once tended grow in symmetrical beds.

Cluny Abbey represented the money and ecclesiastical power of the Church of Rome. Cluny helped map out and build the pilgrimage routes of France (and other European countries). Those routes, dotted with lucrative, Cluny-run monasteries, still lead to the shrine of Saint James the Greater – alias Santiago or Saint Jacques – in Compostela. That's in Galicia, Spain.

You don't have to be Moses to walk on water in Paris. Even a footloose freethinker can happily skip over the flowing Canal Saint Martin and its sources, the farther-flung Canal de l'Ourcq and Bassin de la Villette.

These unsung watercourses built or expanded by Napoleons I and III enter Paris on its northeastern edge at La Villette, site of the city's former slaughterhouses. They curve torpidly across the edgy 19th, 10th, 11th and 4th arrondissements – in that order – until they reach the Seine at the Arsenal Marina.

I was tempted to write "spill" or "rush" but the fact is the canals flow slowly, through many locks. They're the antithesis of in a hurry. At the right time of day the mood along their tree-lined banks matches the go-slow pace of the water.

Missed seeing the canals up to now? That's easy. From behind Place de la République, all the way to the Place de la Bastille and the Arsenal Marina, the Canal Saint Martin runs underground. That's one reason it's easy to walk on its waters: the esplanade on top is a linear garden. The park and flanking roadways change name many times. Parts are asphalted and used twice weekly for open-air markets.

The market on Boulevard Richard Lenoir held Thursdays and Sundays happens to be Paris' best. It's one reason why, when I walk the canals end to end, I start here early on Sunday. In fact, since the new Seine-side walkways have opened on the Right Bank, I pick up the pedestrian path on the river, amble past the Arsenal, then wend my way through the market heading northeast.

For me, the serious excitement starts at the first mossy lock in a pocket-sized park under giant trees. That's where the Quai de Jemmapes and Quai de Valmy begin. You spot your first humpback bridge 100 yards along. From here to the edge of town it's an almost uninterrupted series of locks, placid, greenish water, sycamores five stories high – and cafes, nightclubs, restaurants and bobos galore.

Gallery: Paris River Walk

Before dawn the other day, I stole down to the Seine and waited in darkness until the security
guard at the construction worksite had walked upstream out of sight.

Vaulting with the agility of a middle-aged guy with bad knees, I strode down the newly laid cobbled walkway below the Pont de Sully. The site is part of an ambitious project to slow or banish cars from Paris, and welcome walkers to the Seine while revitalizing the river's UNESCO World Heritage Site banks.

I danced a silent, gleeful jig of victory; the river would soon be ours again!

Soon: In September 2012 the one-mile stretch of walkway on the Right Bank between the Canal Saint Martin and city hall is slated to be finished. In spring 2013 an even longer stretch on the Left Bank near the Musée d'Orsay will be ours. Add them to the existing Seine-side pedestrian areas and by summer of 2013 we will be able to walk across town on either bank following the river almost entirely unmolested by automobiles.

Dateline: Bibracte, Gaul (i.e., France):

Water squirts from seven sacred springs. Towering trees sway. The placid view from leafy Bibracte takes in forests, pastures, lakes, stone-built villages and distant cloud-snagging mountaintops. Somnolence seems guaranteed. But wait: the sweeping prospects pulse with 2,000+ years of bloody history, mystery and bizarre, only-in-France nationalistic lore.

Bibracte? You won't find it on a map, not a current map anyhow. Bibracte is the most celebrated "lost city" of the Celts, the pre-Roman inhabitants of Gaul. Here, somewhere beneath the contorted beech trees, Julius Caesar dictated the perennial bestseller The Conquest of Gaul, etched into tablets in the year 52 B.C.

Bibracte is also where the valiant Gallic warrior Vercingétorix rallied the Celtic tribes of Gaul to face Caesar nearby at Alésia. That's the other celebrated lost city of Gaul's green heartland. "Lost" is the operative word. Caesar drubbed the Celts, marched Vercingétorix to Rome, and imprisoned then murdered him before cheering crowds. End of story? No. This is Gaul, meaning France. The past lives on. And on.

A riot of evocative rubble and vegetation, the remains of Bibracte spread atop Mount Beuvray. Happily you can geo-locate this handsome hill: at 2,500 feet it is one of the highest in Burgundy, sited in an unsung region west of France's finest vineyards in the Côte d'Or.

Granted, neither Bibracte nor Alésia is really lost these days: during the reign of President Francois Mitterrand, the Museum of Celtic Civilization was built on the flanks of Mount Beuvray. This year the spanking new MuséoParc Alésia has opened to crowds of spear-shaking young defeatists. The pair of government-subsidized memorials is linked by an official hiking trail and many roller-coaster meandering two-lane roads on which contemporary Gallic road warriors pilot their turbo-charged diesel chariots.